Jesse Norman: I thank the hon. Members for Ilford North and for Glasgow Central for their speeches. The hon. Member for Ilford North started by setting out the principles of, as it were, a Labour approach to tax avoidance and evasion, and described how, in the Labour view of things, tax avoiders were in fact guilty of robbery, which I thought was a very big claim. Robbery is not a word I would ever use in this context, but there is a serious problem of avoidance and evasion, and—as I will come on to, and as the hon. Member for Glasgow Central mentioned—there is a serious problem with the promotion or enabling of tax avoidance and evasion schemes.
I thank the hon. Member for Ilford North for his comments in support of Revenue and Customs, with which I fully concur, as I am sure does everyone in this Committee and the more than 10 million people who now have their livelihoods or jobs supported by schemes that HMRC has put in place in a very short period. He also rightly praised Sir Amyas Morse, saying that the Labour party accepted the Morse review as a piece of work. He is absolutely right about that. Sir Amyas, on his retirement, elicited unimpeachable measures of approval and statements of support from across the House.
Where I think the hon. Gentleman is wrong is on the question of retrospection. He will be aware that the loan charge is a new charge and is therefore not retrospective legislation. The common understanding of retrospection is that it somehow changes the law as it was at the time when people operated, but the whole point is that, as Sir Amyas found, from at least 10 December 2009, the law was as indicated. One can dispute the period before that, and HMRC retains the ability in the case of certain years to pursue people for tax due before that period. But the review made clear—this is very important—that Sir Amyas Morse accepted the principle of the loan charge. The review made significant changes to the application of a principle that Sir Amyas accepted.
We are bound to return to these themes later on in our discussions, but it is worth touching on them now. The hon. Member for Ilford North raised the provision that the Government did not accept in the Morse review, which was the idea that arrears in tax should be written off after 10 years. The reasons that the Government did not accept that were twofold. The first was that it would have had the effect of treating people who had engaged  in these disguised remuneration schemes and benefited from this approach more favourably than other people who might be in arrears in tax with the Revenue, which the Government felt was not appropriate.
The second reason was that the Revenue and Customs has highly effective time-to-pay arrangements, which have been further extended in the case of the loan charge, to allow people on lower incomes an additional seven years of time to pay as a minimum. Those arrangements are very flexibly and intelligently administered by the Revenue and Customs, and they are already being utilised by people in significant numbers before the coronavirus pandemic and undoubtedly as a result of it. There is no need for a statutory change, and such a change would have had the effect of treating scheme users more favourably than others.
The hon. Member for Ilford North raised the all-party parliamentary loan charge group and the Loan Charge Action Group, which has been very vigorous on social media and elsewhere. Colleagues’ input is always valuable, but we should take this one with a little pinch of salt, because it is the product of an enormous amount of concerted political lobbying of an extremely intense kind on Members who are members of that group. In that sense, it does not exercise what I would consider the kind of independent judgment that we would want an all-party parliamentary group to exercise.
The contrast is with the Morse review itself, which was an admirably independent-minded piece of work. It by no means took a Government line in any of its recommendations and showed itself all the more valuable for that. It was itself a comprehensive response to the concerns that had been raised. If people have concerns about, for example, the choice that Sir Amyas made to locate the point of cut-off for the application of the loan charge to 10 December 2009, they have merely to read the relevant chapter, which is an extremely thorough and careful reconstruction of the legal process and the enforcement process up to and after that date.